on it. It was a little creepy, actually.
“Brigid!” she shrieked, when she heard my voice. Maisie called everyone’s name that way, as if she had heard they were dead and was pleasantly surprised to find them alive.
“Sorry, Brigid,” she said when I asked for Coleman. “She’s not here. She didn’t come in this morning.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“I sure do. The retirement center where her parents live called to say her mom was sick and asking for her.” Maisie made her compassionate burbling sound. She probably had a sympathy card already stamped.
“Did she leave a message for me?”
Checking, “No, Brigid. If she calls in do you want me to tell her anything?”
“Just tell her I called.”
“Okay, sweetie, I will.”
I hung up. It took me a second to process, but I wondered: what would be a big enough emergency that Coleman wouldn’t do something, leave a message or call me on the way? Even if Coleman was going a little rogue on me, she was still rigidly efficient. I called back.
“Maisie, do you know what retirement center her parents are in?”
“No, sweetie, I have no idea.”
Twenty-seven
To show I wasn’t feeling particularly guilty, I arrived at the medical examiner’s office fifteen minutes late, mentioned who I was there for, and was shown back to the autopsy room where George Manriquez had already opened what appeared from a distance to be a pastel-blue sea lion but smelled a whole lot worse than old raw fish. I could hear George talking into a microphone suspended above the gurney as I paused to get used to the smell, “Caucasian male, five feet nine inches tall, weighing approximately one hundred forty-five pounds at time of death. Time of death difficult to determine given advanced state of decomposition.” He spoke in a less formal way to Max, “With the combined humidity and heat in the van, decomposition could have been much more rapid than usual.”
“Give it a guess, Doc,” Max said.
“Could be as little as forty-eight hours, as much as four days. Sorry I can’t be as precise as they are in the movies.”
“But this couldn’t happen in less than two days, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s right. Give me a little more time to call a specialist who can do the math on temperature inside the van relative to the insect activity and I might be able to come closer.”
George finally glanced at me with curiosity. I’d been there a little too often for someone who had been decommissioned four years before.
Max wasn’t totally cruel. He gave me some mentholatum to smear under my nose to counteract the stench of decomposition so dense you could feel it like oil on your skin.
But he did make me watch the whole thing while he watched me, from the external exam to the Y incision to the part where they peel the scalp inside out over the face and cut the top of the skull off with a Stryker saw, which sounds like they’re drilling teeth from the back. Along the way Manriquez absentmindedly smashed a couple left-over maggots with a latex-covered thumb while he simultaneously talked to us and recorded his comments into the microphone. Even the assistant who was carrying organs back and forth to be weighed and photographed looked a little green. Nobody enjoys a decomp. I met Max’s stoicism with my own.
“Here’s the odd thing,” Manriquez was saying, gently poking his right index finger through a rotting fissure in the corpse’s left thigh. “It’s harder to tell with the advanced state of decomp but I’m almost certain this wasn’t done postmortem. Did you say there was a box cutter found on the floor of the van at the scene?”
Max nodded. “The floor was actually the roof because it had turned upside down, but yeah, there was a box cutter.”
“I should have come to the scene.”
“We tried to get you.”
“The box cutter could have done this, or some other blade. I don’t think it was an accident.”
“You sure it’s not suicide?” Max asked.
“Pretty tortuous way to go. If he wanted to bleed to death it would have been more efficient to cut his jugular vein. It’s a lot closer to the surface and you pass out faster.”
“He might not have known.”
I wisely kept silent, waiting to hear why I’d been asked to attend.
Max kept his dialogue going with Manriquez. “Homicide?”
“I really do think so. Possibly accidental homicide, close-quarter fight in the van. Definitely keep it open.”
“Okay, Doc. Keep him on ice. I’ll check on NOK